Remembering Rav Moshe Shapira on His 7th Yahrtzeit

Photo: Mattis Goldberg

MY friend Rabbi Menachem Nissel has produced the first full-length biography of Rav Moshe Shapira ztz”l, almost certainly the most influential Torah thinker in recent decades. I would not be surprised if it is not the last biography. Not because it is not an excellent work — it is — but because Rabbi Nissel’s intention was never to write a comprehensive biography, as the title makes clear: Looking into the Sun: A Taste of the Life, Torah, and Legacy of Rav Moshe Shapira through the Lens of One Talmid.

Looking into the Sun is a brilliant title. Just as we cannot look into the sun without going blind, but rather we know the sun by virtue of the light it casts and the heat it provides, so, too, the light of Rav Moshe is so bright that he can only be discerned by the cumulative impact of his Torah on the thousands who hung upon his words.

Rabbi Nissel makes this point in his Preface and Disclaimer, which is based on one of the many hespedim given by Rav Aaron Lopiansky: “The closer we got, the more each gravitated naturally/To different facets of his Torah teachings, and personality/Mishoresh nishmaseinu, the uniqueness of our humanity/We heard the same words, but for each it resonated differently…. If we each give a hesped, from our own point of view,/Then the sum of our words will give us a clue,/How to echo the greatness of the rebbi we knew….”

Though Rabbi Nissel quotes over 200 talmidim of Rav Moshe, Looking into the Sun is very much a personal memoir of a rebbi-talmid relationship, albeit that of a very close talmid. I first met Rabbi Nissel over 40 years ago, around the same time he joined the shiur given by Rav Moshe at Mishkan HaTorah. His brilliant smile made him one of the most beheint people I have ever met (and that has not changed over the decades), and Rav Moshe felt the same way. Rabbi Nissel was a yeled sha’ashua in the Shapira household. Where others trembled before summoning up the courage to speak to Rav Moshe, he was never afraid to ask questions, many of them while driving Rav Moshe to the mikveh Erev Shabbos after a shiur. And he consulted with Rav Moshe on every aspect of his life.